Meloni: ‘The budget will include tax relief on pay rises. Mattarella? When he was a minister, he was in favour of a cap on the number of foreign pupils in each class.’

The 2025 deficit still above 3per cent? ‘I’m disappointed that we haven’t managed to exit the EU procedure early’, but ‘we’ll press ahead with the original roadmap’. The budget? “I want to confirm that contractual pay rises will be tax-free.” The words of Sergio Mattarella on education? “The President of the Republic says we must overcome ghettos, not create them,” and this is the direction behind the Government’s desire to create “more balanced classes”. Giorgia Meloni chooses Bruno Vespa’s talk show on Rai 1 – first on *Cinque Minuti* and then on *Porta a porta* – to comment on the very latest news and lay into her opponents.

Meloni, too, uses the word “regret” in relation to the Istat figures on the deficit, which were cited off the cuff by the Minister for the Economy Giancarlo Giorgetti. “I regret this,” says the Prime Minister, “because on the very same day, Istat also announced that it is revising its estimates for Italian growth in 2024. There had been a 30 per cent error, which occurred every year since then, after which the figures were revised upwards. I don’t know whether Istat is underestimating Italians or the Government, but it is happening. I would be disappointed if this were to happen again in two years’ time and we were to discover that we were below 3 per cent and the estimates had been too conservative.”

In any case, the Prime Minister assures us, the road map will continue uninterrupted. In the ‘final stretch’ for one of the forthcoming Cabinet meetings is ‘the extension, above all, of the simplifications provided for in the single SEZ’, on which Meloni sees ‘a certain degree of consensus: I heard Secretary Schlein say that a unified proposal from the broad coalition is the extension of the SEZ, even though they used to say it was a pointless exercise that would serve no purpose. If the only unified proposal they have is one of our ideas, there is a bit of a problem, but I’m pleased that we’ll be approving it together’. In the Budget Bill, however, “I want to confirm the tax exemption on contractual pay rises, raised to 5 per cent in the private sector” as part of the 2026 budget. “According to studies carried out by the Ministry of Labour, the measure has benefited over 4 million workers who have received a pay rise thanks to this measure. We are gradually catching up in terms of wages.”

Regarding the criticism of the Education Decree, which is due to be discussed by the Council of Ministers on Thursday, the Prime Minister disputes the interpretation of the Head of State’s words – an interpretation which, in her view, is put forward by those whose sole aim is to ‘criticise the Government’s initiative’. The aim of avoiding ghettos is, according to the Prime Minister, precisely what the Government is pursuing. ‘A ghetto is clearly much easier to create if you take a foreign child who does not speak our language and place them in a class where the majority of pupils do not speak our language. That is a ghetto. Whereas creating a more equitable distribution of classes – more balanced classes – serves precisely to prevent a ghetto.’

According to Meloni, the President of the Republic ‘talks about overcoming communication breakdowns, but what is the basis for overcoming them? Language. So much so that we are, in fact, talking about a better distribution of foreign pupils who do not speak our language’. Here, the Prime Minister becomes pointed: ‘When the President of the Republic was Minister for Education, he drew up circulars urging that foreign pupils should not be concentrated in the same class; it is a common-sense measure. I believe it is right to carry this forward.”